Like this:

A confession: as you lay here before me, splayed and pink and wet and raw, I can think only of words and their etymologies.

Carnal. Middle English, from the Latin carnalis, fleshly, which is in turn the adjectival form of caro, flesh. Carnalis is, of course, of the same lineage as carnale, which survives in English as charnel.

These are fine words, simple and short. The wonderful thing about simpler, shorter words is that they express more essential concepts. They arise from necessity, from practicality. Imagine that you’re a hunter wandering pre-historic plains. Short, simple sounds describe the most important things in your life. Sun. Spear. Water. Food. Dog. It’s amazing how many languages these words and their variations appear in. Thousands of years of linguistic evolution, of physical separation, and these fundamental sounds remain the same.

Caro, from the Greek keirein, to shear. Keiro then being the first-person present tense form of the verb. But keiro is a short word, too, and there are so many synonyms for a word like “shear.” So many connotations. Such subtlety.

Your clothes are an obstacle to be overcome. From the proto-Indo-European, gleyt, to cling to, to cleave, to stick.

Keiro. I shear.

You demure, your coy playfulness is a barrier, a wall of silk and lace and perfume. But walls are meant to be breached. A wall erected to keep others out necessarily implies a thing worth having, worth possessing, does it not? Secrets and softness and weakness. Norse, silki.

Keiro. I cut.

What I see before me, I take. Again and again, I take. It is mine. It must be. If it weren’t, would it not be better defended? Would there not be an army to oppose me, to say no, stop, don’t? Old English, tacan, to grasp, to touch.

Keiro. I ravage.

It’s a festival, isn’t it? A celebration, this back and forth, this sawing, this blood. We are creatures of blood and bone and flesh, and flesh is a thing to be consumed. Cows must stand in a field and gorge on grass all day long just to sustain themselves. But a human eats a small part of the cow and they are sated. It was flesh that awakened us. Only on the day that our ancestors looked up from their herbs and their grasses and saw the flesh before them, splayed and pink and wet and raw, did they develop the capacity for thought. Only then did they become real.

Like this:

Fun fact, this marks my 200th post! Now, unfortunately that doesn’t mean 200 stories. In fact, it even includes posts where I announced that I wouldn’t be updating properly. But still! 200! That’s a big round number and that’s neat!

Anyway, here’s a new piece of flash-fiction for you all inspired by a conversation I had earlier about GMOs. Enjoy!

There were two men in suits at the door, and if a lifetime of getting screwed over by forces beyond her control and comprehension had taught Maria anything it was that nothing good ever came when men in suits showed up unannounced on your doorstep. Still, she put on a happy face and greeted the two strangers. “Good morning, gentlemen. Can I help you with something?”

The two men couldn’t have looked more different from each other. One of them was fair-skinned, tall and thin with glasses and a clean-shaven face. The other was dark and squat and thick with a long yet well-kept beard. “Are you Maria Delcosta?” Beard asked.

Maria’s eyes went wide.

“Forgive my companion, Mrs. Delcosta,” Glasses said with a smile. “He can be a little brusque, but he’s quite harmless, I assure you.”

Silence hung in the air as Maria tried to place the name of the company. “Wait,” she finally said. “The cookie people?”

Glasses chuckled. “That’s correct, Mrs. Delcosta. ChocoDelight is one of the many brands within the Monde-Agra family.”

“Did James win a scholarship?”

“Not exactly, Mrs. Delcosta.”

“However, we are pleased to inform you of an exciting new opportunity for James’s future. May we come inside?”

Maria looked from one man to the other and back again. “I suppose.” She pushed the door open and the two men stepped through. Maria led them over to the living room where the two of them sat on the couch and Maria sat facing them on a loveseat.

“Mrs. Delcosta, we’ll be frank,” Beard said. “Did you consume ChocoDelight while you were pregnant with your son James?”

“I… guess so? I don’t know that was ten years ago. I mean, probably, but I don’t specifically remember eating it.”

“Well, we have reason to believe that you did, and consequently, we have reason to believe that your son James has the MONAG7 gene.”

Maria blinked. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

“It’s extremely likely,” Glasses said. His hands were folded on together on his lap and he leaned forward in his seat. He reminded her of a guidance counselor she’d known in high school. “ChocoDelight has been known to alter the germ cells of men and women aged 24-35 who consume them.”

“Fetuses that develop from these cells may have the MONAG7 which can, in turn, express itself in easily identifiable ways in children at the age of 10.”

“Are you telling me your fucking cookies changed my genes?”

“Not at all, Mrs. Delcosta. But your eggs may have been altered as a result of choices you have made and products you have used.”

“This possibility is made clear on every package of ChocoDelight.”

“It’s hardly our fault if you didn’t read the End User License Agreement on the freshness seal.”

Beard stood up. “Let me be a bit clearer. You will let us inspect James for signs of MONAG7, or we will alert the authorities, we will have you arrested, we will take everything that you own, and you will die alone and forgotten in a woman’s prison.”

“You can’t take my boy.”

“James Delcosta,” Glasses called out. “Come to the living room, please. My associate and I need to speak with you.”

A boy with light brown hair and a scared look on his face poked his head out of a doorway. Glasses waved him over.

“James, honey, don’t–”

Beard moved around behind the loveseat and set a firm hand on Maria’s shoulder. “Stay seated, Mrs. Delcosta.”

Glasses got down on one knee and looked James square in the eye. “Follow my finger, please,” he said to the boy. “Just with your eyes, not with your head. Look left. Now right. This is going to sting.”

“Ow!”

“How’s it look?” Beard asked.

Glasses shook a test tube and held it up. A single drop of red spread through the liquid inside and turned pink. “MONAG7-A negative. The child’s clean.” He slipped the vial into his pocket and tousled James’s hair. “Get out of here son.”

Like this:

The preacher of the new god stood before the temple and took a deep breath. This was foolish, he knew. It was illegal to preach of foreign gods in the city. At best, he was likely to be mocked and derided, laughed out of the temple and told to preach his gospel to the beggars and the madmen of the slums. At worst, they might beat him or stone him.

That’s what the Hellenes did, Paulus had told him. They played at being a civilized people with their carefully planned cities and their marble columns. Perhaps most of them were innocent, as innocent as non-believers could be. They said their misguided prayers and their left offerings to their stone idols and they went about their lives like good folk everywhere tried to. “We preach for them,” Paulus had said. “For those who would follow the one true God and his son but are cursed with living in ignorance. We preach to save them, just as we have been saved from our own ignorance.”

The preacher kept this mission firmly in mind as he walked up the steps of the temple. “What you do now, you do for the good of others, for their salvation.”

The inside of the temple was much as he had imagined it would be. Dimly lit by candles and braziers, smoky with incense, and crowded with people from all walks of life. A vendor stood in the corner peddling herbs and animals to be left as sacrifices, coins and figurines to be used as votive offerings. No one paid him any mind, but why should they? They didn’t know that he had come to speak as the prophet of the one true God. As he stood there in silence, a few eyes began to drift away from the altars and settle on him. The Hellenes spoke to each other in hush whispers. Expectant and curious and wary faces regarded him. There was nothing else to do but begin his sermon.

The preacher took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Another. “Men and women of this fine city, I see clearly that you are very religious. In my time in this place, I have seen many objects of your worship, statues and altars and other fine things. You have a goddess for the harvest, a god for the sea, gods and goddesses for every aspect of your lives. No matter the supplication, there is a deity you can turn to for help. But if you will hear me, I will tell you of the one true God, the God who hears and answers your prayers even when you bend your knee to false idols.”

The sermon went on, and slowly a crowd began to gather before the preacher. His eyes scanned the faces before him nervously at first looking for any sign of malice, but as more came to hear his words, his confidence grew. “Why, I see in this very temple an altar bearing the inscription ‘To an Unknown God,’” he said. “I tell you, when you worship at this altar in ignorance, you worship the God that made the world and everything in it!”

A voice called out. “Our unknown god is not your god, Ioudaios. I will not sit idly by while you fill my people’s heads with lies and instruct them to forsake the old ways.”

The preacher searched the crowd to find the source of the voice. In the back was a withered old crone, barely supported by staff. Her back was bent almost double and her body trembled with palsy, but there was fire in her eyes, and she regarded the preacher with nothing so much as hatred. The preacher forced a smile to his face and cleared his throat. “Grandmother, how do you know that our gods are not the same one. After all, my God created–”

“I know because I have seen my god in the flesh. Tell me, have you met yours? Can you look your god in eye? When you speak to him, does he answer you?”

“Does yours? A stone idol is not the same thing as the one true God incarnate, Grandmother.” Some of the crowd laughed at that, and the preacher allowed himself a smile. This was going better than he had dared hope. Perhaps he had a gift for speaking, like Paulus.

The ancient woman’s expression contorted in anger for a moment, but then she grinned. The preacher winced. The woman’s smile was almost as broken as the rest of her, and her few remaining teeth looked to be stained dark from red wine. “No, of course not. A statue is nothing. These gods you denounce are nothing. But if you like, you may come with me and I will introduce you to my own savior.”

The preacher laughed. “Of course, grandmother. Show me whatever charlatan disfigured beast it is you bend your knee to.” The gathered crowd laughed too, and the preacher smiled. The old woman would surely blush and turn away, or curse him and flee. The argument for the souls of the Hellenes was over, and he had won.

“Of course, my child. Follow me.” The old woman turned and disappeared through a doorway. The preacher watched her go, frowning. He stood his ground and was just about to resume his sermon when a child spoke aloud, “You don’t need to fear her. The one true God will protect you, won’t He?”

“He will,” the preacher muttered. “Of course He will! The one true God protects all who believe in Him!”

The preacher stepped through the doorway and into some kind of storage room. It seemed as if he had stepped into some ancient, chthonic temple entirely. Strange, shapeless idols lined the walls. The scent of turned earth filled the air. Darkness lurked in the corners of the room like a skulking animal. The preacher swallowed, called out. “Where did you go, Grandmother? Surely you didn’t leave the temple completely?”

“Here, my child! Down here!”

The preacher turned his head towards the sound of the old woman’s voice. It seemed to come from the darkness itself, but as he squinted, the shadows resolved themselves into another doorway with steps leading down. The preacher took a deep breath. “The one true God protects me,” he whispered to himself. He stepped forward, his eyes slowly adjusting to the gloom. There was a faint light bobbing far below him, a torch held by someone descending a staircase.

“Grandmother,” the preacher called out. “Are you so eager to inter yourself within the earth?” But she gave no response. “The one true God protects me,” the preacher whispered. He repeated these words over and over with each step, a mantra born of equal parts determination and fear. But the light in the dark got no closer until at last he was upon the old woman. She stood with a sly grin on her face, the flickering torch before and a basalt door engraved with a script he had never seen before behind her. “Shall you know the unknown god, Ioudaios?”

The preacher closed his eyes. When he opened them, his expression was as hard and unyielding as the stone door the woman guarded. “Show me whatever false idol you have secreted away, Grandmother. I will look upon it, denounce it, and let all the city know of your folly.”

The old woman’s grin grew wider still. “I promise you, boy. You will find yourself praying to the unknown god before you ever speak a word against it.” She turned to the wall and activated some hidden mechanism. With a groan and a sudden rush of wind, the basalt door slid into the ground. “Enter, my child. Enter and see.”

There was nothing to see but darkness. The room was an inky black without even the light of a candle or a torch to illuminate. The preacher stepped forward and stood still, waiting for his eyes to adjust and reveal to him whatever the Hellenes had hidden away in the depths of the city, whatever secrets they kept even from their fellow citizens. But the darkness never changed, not even after many minutes of silence and staring. “Well?” he said. “Where is this–”

A jewel appeared floating in the air, a strange red-gold that was neither ruby nor topaz. And then another and another. They winked in and out of existence. A few disappearing and others appearing to replace them with every passing second.

“What–” the preacher began, but more jewels than before appeared, a sea of them spaced haphazardly throughout the air like stars in the night sky. At last, the preacher understood what was before him. The blackness was not shadow, but some enormous creature that filled the room with its bulk. There were not jewels before him, but eyes. More eyes even than the mythical Argus. But Argus was a giant with a body like a man. Argus did not twist and writhe like a nest of vipers. He did not have mouths all over his body, great gaping holes like a leech’s sucker with teeth. Argus was myth, and the unknown god was even now focusing all of its shining eyes on the preacher, even now wrapping thick ropy cords around his arms and legs and pulling him towards its waiting slavering mouths.

The preacher screamed for an eternity, first in animal terror and next for mercy and finally simply out of agony. But the old woman paid him no mind. She simply activated the mechanism once more and turned away as the basalt door slid back into place. The climb back up the steps and into the light of day was long and painful, but she laughed softly to herself the entire way.

All who met the unknown god prayed to it, she mused. So many prayers, and none of them ever answered.

Like this:

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ghenn said. Robaire’s words, the accusation behind them, didn’t faze her in the slightest. She registered them, and in some distant space in the back of her mind she thought, “Wait, what?” but they wouldn’t sway her from her course. Robaire had to be stopped. He had to be made to answer for Kyle and Jando’s deaths. There would be time for questions, time for an investigation later. Now there was only those cruel eyes, that arrogant sneer, the porcine face, and what she was going to do about it.

Robaire’s eyes locked onto Ghenn’s. He was silent, his brows furrowed in concentration as he studied her. “Get him,” the voice whispered. “Wrap your fingers around his throat. Do it.”

“They offered you freedom. They told you, ‘Do our dirty work and we’ll grant you three wishes.’ Is that it?”

“Your words won’t save you, Robaire.”

Robaire sniffed. “Save me from what?”

“Justice.”

Robaire stared at Ghenn, his eyes wide and his mouth slightly open in disbelief. And then he laughed, the sound sharp and harsh and loud. It echoed off the bulkhead in the tiny room, and doubtless it could be heard ringing all throughout the station. They’d all hear Robaire laughing at her. “Oh, that’s too good,” he said. “That is just fucking hilarious. The murderer thinks that she’s going to serve me ‘justice.’” Robaire frowned, his flabby face hardening into stone. “Well, whatever you’re going to do, get it over with. They told me I’d be spending the rest of my life up here, anyway. I’d rather it be another minute than another century.”

Confusion and anger cut through Ghenn’s cold determination. “What are you talking about? You’re the murderer! You hacked into Daddy Dearest’s systems and sabotaged them! You poisoned Kyle! You suffocated Jando! You–” The look on Robaire’s face stopped Ghenn mid-sentence. She saw something there she’d never seen before. Fear.

“How could I possibly hack Daddy Dearest? The goddamn machine’s impenetrable! It’d take every AI down on Earth a hundred years to do it!”

“You got in when I cracked Daddy Dearest. You got in and you killed them,” Ghenn said. Her voice was little more than a whisper, and already the thoughts were creeping back into her head to eliminate Robaire before he could do more harm.

“Bullshit you cracked Daddy Dearest. Friendulate did social networking nonsense, not cybersecurity.”

“They gave me a program. It left a vulnerability you exploited! I know it was you! I saw outside activity in the network!”

Robaire blinked in confusion. His eyes went wide and he buried his face in his hands. “Hundreds of years ago, the Agency spent millions of dollars trying to figure out how to control people’s minds, and all they had to do was wait for the day when we’d be desperate and stupid enough to let them in ourselves.” Robaire shook his head. “It was the Agency, Ghenn, not me. You let them in, and they went right to their bloody work. They gave you a list of names, didn’t they?”

“Eliminate him!” the voice hissed. “Silence him now!” But Ghenn ignored it. The growing unease in the pit of her stomach was too strong to ignore. “How did you know that?”

“They gave me one, too, when I was sent up here. They give every would-be recruit a list of names, and they watch and they wait. I’m sure they were watching you through Daddy Dearest’s own eyes, once you let them into the system, and I’m sure that as soon as they found you… too sensitive for their work, they decided to go ahead without you.”

“How do you know that?”

Robaire smiled. There was a sadness to it instead of his characteristic smugness. “Simple. Your company didn’t do cybersecurity or government work. Mine did. I know how these people think, and if I’m right, they’ve been jumping up and down with glee because you finally handed them the one thing they couldn’t get otherwise, the one thing no one could construct in operate in secret, that already existed but that no one could claim. Just think about it. Daddy Dearest’s stations house humans, but we’re not necessary. Hell, removing us would probably simplify things. Without us, Daddy Dearest could collect the junk floating around out here and recycle it into something more useful. The factories on-board each station could be programmed to make most anything you wanted. It’d be trivial to make something simple, something like a steel rod twenty feet long and two feet across, one with a simple propulsion system. ” Robaire chuckled. “Ghenn, you’ve given them the keys to a fully automated orbital weapons platform. You— are you even listening to me?”

The voice was screaming for her to strangle the life out of Robaire right this instant. That must have been the Agency, too. The program had made changes to her BiOS, after all. Robaire had been right. She’d let them into her own mind. “What are we going to do?”

“Die horribly, probably.” Robaire shrugged. “This conversation’s been recorded, I’m sure. They probably don’t have anyone watching at this particular moment, otherwise Daddy Dearest would have sealed the doors and drained the oxygen, but they’ll find out soon enough. A day, an hour, a week. And then they’ll find a way to eliminate us.” Robaire thought about it. “Probably everyone. I’m sure the whole system would run a lot smoother without prisoners trying to muck it up.”

“That’s it? We’re doomed?”

“Correction: We’re all doomed, and the Agency gets a shiny new weapons system they can use anywhere on the planet with no warning. It’s win-win.”

Ghenn walked out of Robaire’s room feeling nothing. The weight of what she’d done, of all that Robaire had revealed to her had crushed her and left her remains numb and broken. “I’m dead,” she thought. “No matter what, I’m dead. If he’s telling the truth, the Agency will kill me as soon as they go through Daddy Dearest’s security footage. If he’s lying and he’s an Agent, he’ll report me and they’ll kill me anyway.”

She looked out a viewport at the MDCU’s scouring the debris fields for material. They should be in their hangars, she realized. The shift was over and there was no one piloting them, but still they gathered materials for some inscrutable purpose.

“Well, if we’re all dead, anyway,” Ghenn muttered. She opened up a BiOS window and started a secure session, for whatever good that would do her. She went through Daddy Dearest’s systems one by one to see what options were available to her. She’d been locked out of resetting everything, of course. Communications were all down. Shutting down the recycling plants and the factories wasn’t an option. She could still control the MDCU’s, for whatever reason. She could remotely pilot them for a few seconds, but a signal from Daddy Dearest overrode her control before she could do anything useful. She looked at the code controlling the MDCU’s and as a test put in a command for one of the machines to cease all operations.

It did. She counted out thirty seconds in her head. Daddy Dearest didn’t issue it any new orders.

Ghenn opened up another secure session and began running calculations. Orbits and trajectories, angles of interception. She could ram an MDCU right through each of the station. It’d be completely irreparable by automation. Maintenance crews would have to be sent up, and they’d see that someone had been in Daddy Dearest’s systems. They’d reset everything. They’d lock the Agency out. There’d be no kinetic projectiles raining hell down on the Agency’s enemies, no slow asphyxiation or drug overdose or starvation as she and the rest of the DCC floated helplessly in space. It’d be quick, painless. Preferable, all things considered.

Out beyond the debris fields Ghenn had come to call home, the moon rose behind the Earth. She watched with a smile on her face as she saw it, just like the first time, just like every time.

Like this:

Sorry folks, no update tonight. I blame terrible time management skills. Expect Debris to wrap up on Monday and flash fiction through the remainder of the month. Come November, I’ll either attempt NaNoWriMo or try and revisit a few loose threads this year. We’ll see how ambitious/insane I’m feeling at the end of the month.

Share this:

Like this:

Robaire noticed Ghenn staring at him from out of the corner of his piggish little eye and turned to glare at her. “And just what are you looking at, hm?”

“Nothing. Nobody,” Ghenn replied instantly out of habit. Silence hung in the air. Robaire sniffed and smirked and turned his head back towards the monitor. A wave of anger washed over Ghenn. The senseless, insistent urge to say something that would cut through his indifference was too strong to ignore. “A nobody.”

Robaire’s head snapped back. His eyes met Ghenn’s and for a moment, she saw unbridled rage in them. But the look only lasted a moment. His temper cooled some to contempt. Ghenn shrugged indifferently. Robaire snorted and walked away from the crowd. Ghenn smiled, pleased with herself for having finally gotten to him in some small way.

* * *

On screen, Kyle looked peaceful in death, if a bit unrefined. Practical, really. That was it; the preparations were just a bit too practical for a proper funeral.

That made sense, Ghenn supposed. Daddy Dearest wasn’t human, after all, and he had forbidden the crew on Kyle’s station from interfering with the body. The camera showed Kyle in a stasis pod, his skin a bit discolored, his hair mussed. He was wearing the simple jumper that they all wore as their uniform, but he looked peaceful. The intensity that he carried with him every day of his life, that had defined the man, was gone. There was only rest now. An involuntary, eternal rest, but rest. There were flowers picked from the station’s hydroponic garden arrayed around him, a surprisingly delicate and aesthetic touch from Daddy Dearest. They were nice. Kyle would have said that he hated them and thought they were ridiculous, but then he would have let them be. It was a good touch. A sensitivity in death that he wouldn’t have allowed himself in life.

“Dust thou art,” Ghenn whispered. “And to dust shalt thou return.”

“Hm?” Panna murmured.

“It’s a line from the Christian Bible. Kyle told me once that his great-great-grandparents were Christian. Seemed appropriate.”

Panna nodded. Ghenn thought about it a bit more. “Plus, think about it. On Earth, we were all executives and founders and rich as Hell. And now we’re cleaning up space debris. To dust have we returned.”

An older woman, Elaine kicked Ghenn’s chair from behind. “Shh!” Ghenn turned around in her seat and stuck her tongue out, but was otherwise silent. Her eyes quickly scanned the gathered crowd. Everyone was present but Robaire, but that was to be expected. He wasn’t really the type to go to the funeral of someone like Kyle. General anti-social tendencies aside, he and Kyle had been competitors, both of them quietly vying for defense contracts while they pushed their more palatable services onto the public at large.

Plus, Kyle made him look like the squat, foul-tempered troll that he was, and he was far too proud to mourn the death of someone who was better than him.

Ghenn shook her head. Where were these thoughts coming from? Ever since she’d installed the Agency program, she felt like she was fighting to keep her mind coherent and her thoughts organized.

Of course, the two deaths, one right after the other, didn’t help. She hadn’t slept right in what felt like weeks.

But then, she’d only installed the program a few days ago, hadn’t she? Why was it so hard to remember?

And the cold war she has running with Robaire wasn’t doing her any favors either, of course. In fact, that was probably worst of all. The slimy little bastard.

“Find him,” a voice seemed to whisper in her head. “Confront him. He’s older than you, soft and flabby. Even if he got violent, you could take him. The man’s a mess, and you have Daddy Dearest on your side.”

Ghenn’s eyes narrowed to slits. Her hands balled up. She was angry, unfathomably angry. But she couldn’t just get up and attack him in the middle of a funerary service. Daddy Dearest would intervene and detain them both, and once he’d investigated, she’d clearly be guilty of assault.

“He’s the one that’s guilty,” the voice said. “He’s the murderer.”

That was right. Robaire had to pay for killing Kyle and Jando. He couldn’t get away with it. He couldn’t be left alone to kill again. She was the only one with any idea of the truth of what had happened. She had to get answers. She had to stop him.

The eyes of the others rested on Ghenn as she stood up and walked away. Panna hissed at her, “Where are you going?” but she paid the younger woman no mind. Ghenn’s footsteps echoed off the walls of the station’s bulkhead, like an antique clock marking out the seconds until the time of Robaire’s punishment.

The door to Robaire’s bunk was slightly ajar. Ghenn pushed it open, and found him sitting there alone, a smug smile on his face. He snorted. “So,” he said. “The Agency got to you, too.”